Imagine That: Other lives

that moment.

And I thought back to when I was very small, not that I remembered much at that age. But I knew the story. That was when my parents were still young and had been married only a year or so. They had planned to live in New Brighton, but new plans had been made and they had shifted across the city to the hills.

I thought about that. What if my parents had lived in New Brighton when I was a toddler? I could have grown up there, and never met Lew, because he lived on the hills. My whole life could have passed in another place, and Lew would never have met. We would have passed through our lives on separate paths and never met, and we would never had gone rambling, or found that brutish rock, and the rock would never been rolled. Not by us anyway.

The toddler years.

When I was a toddler, one frightening day, I went wandering along the beach. My parents were there but toddlers are always on the move. They had not seen me climb the sand and stumble down the other side, blinking in the bright sunlight, chasing the gulls. I had no fear. The world was a huge, friendly place. Everyone was my friend. I followed the edge of the sea and sat in the sand, while my parents went wild with terror.

They found me, eventually, and I didn't know why my mother was crying.

The childhood years.

If I had stayed in New Brighton, I would have gone to the local school. All my friends would have been different. I might have had a different girl friend too, if I had had a girlfriend. That never happened but perhaps if I had stayed in the city I would have found one?

"We usually end up marrying our friends," Mum used to say.

So if I live anywhere too long, eventually I'll end up marrying someone I know? That narrows it down to a knife-edge of choices. Five billion people in the world and I get stuck with the person who lives a few houses down the street?

And what if I had had an accident. I could have fallen off a roof, or been run over, or sampled something poisonous in the garage. I had so many crashes on my bicycle its a wonder I can still walk! I might have been confined to a wheelchair, and perhaps Lew might have been too. We could have sat together in hospital and laughed about how similar we were and dreamed about being able to run like wild rabbits across the hills.